Uncovering what the past has hidden, Jean [in "The Callender Papers"] finds the present menacing. Thinking carefully, as she has been taught to do, doesn't protect her from the evil she meets in life for the first time. She learns that what lies beneath the surface in people is not always what one imagines as she slowly pieces together what is really going on….

As in her Dicey Tillerman books, Cynthia Voigt gives us a spunky young heroine forced into precocious independence and resourcefulness, as well as adults who'll victimize kids if allowed. Although this genre novel is entertaining, interesting and well-written, it does not, and does not pretend to, offer the sensitively drawn, richly memorable real-life characters and situations that made its predecessors so rewarding.